Twitter's Big Service Screw-Up

From dropped calls to clueless clerks, service shortcomings inevitably leave their mark on offending brands. For that reason, Twitter can’t be happy about its severe server outage on
Thursday. And, of late, the micro-blogging leader had been performing so well.

“After nearly a year without any significant periods of downtime, using Twitter [has been] almost nothing
like the early days of being on the service,” AllThingsD notes. Yet, “After nearly six months of site reliability above 99 percent, Twitter was unreachable across the Web and mobile
devices multiple times over the course of [Thursday], with intermittent periods of uptime and downtime.” Arguably making matters worse, Twitter representatives offered little initial explanation
for the outages. Later on Thursday, the company’s official Twitter account offered up some sparse updates.

However, “It wasn’t until about 4:30 pm that Twitter offered a
lengthier explanation of the day’s events,” AllThingsD recalls. “It’s imperative that we remain available around the world, and today we stumbled,” Twitter VP of
engineering Mazen Rawashdeh wrote in a blog post on Thursday afternoon explaining the outages. “Not how we wanted today to go.”